


discography

by deathbyprophecy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexual Steve Harrington, But Not For Awhile, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Gay Will Byers, Homophobic Language, I just really dislike him and also he died, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Perks of Being a Wallflower - Freeform, Post-Season/Series 03, References to David Bowie, Sorry no Billy, Steve's parents suck, Toxic Masculinity, bc like it's the 80s, but i'm going insane, i don't care if they end up being a jerk i like this version of them, i have no clue about character's ages, i haven't written fanfic since the eighth grade, i'm shit at titles, robin is way too cool for steve, robin's friend group is what i wish i had, so here, so i make them up, sorry about that, too much david bowie talk, tunnel scene from perks, yes the cool metalhead is based off that one character from the set photos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:54:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27508699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathbyprophecy/pseuds/deathbyprophecy
Summary: Steve Harrington used to think there was nothing else left that could be wrong with him.But with Robin soon to be off at college, and Steve aimless and working at Family Video, things he'd stowed away for years start to surface.And he, for one, is not a big fan.
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley/Tammy Thompson, Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 70





	1. Heroes

Sometimes even Steve was shocked at how far he’d fallen. Some mornings when he was brushing his teeth, he would catch a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror and jump at his face, his shoulders, his hair. In the innermost pockets of his mind that he let stay happy and stupid despite all the shit that happened in the past two years, he was still a monarch. King Steve, the ass who skipped class, who ruled the school with Carol and that dickwad Tommy H., and made out with Nancy Wheeler in the bathroom before homeroom. 

He could remember those days easy, junior year and all its meaningless glory. It had been two years, enough to make him cringe at that image of his past self, and many of the images that came after it, too. He’d had and lost Nancy, gotten to know Henderson and the rest of the little shits, and officially lost his chance at college. And then of course, Robin. Everything with Robin. 

But he always jumped a bit when Steve the Dingus, the legal adult who had fought (more like had his ass kicked by) Russian spies and Billy Hargrove, was staring at him from the bathroom mirror. Because he would always think of himself, just on default, as the exalted King Steve of years’ past. He assumed that’s what people meant when they referred to the unavoidable fact that he had indeed peaked in high school, and now had to sit and wait through all the long, exhausting years after the fact. 

And this year, at least, this summer was certainly tedious. Well, there was the Russian spies thing, but that had worked itself out over the course of a week or two. It was like it always was in Hawkins, an insane rush, and enough to make Steve forget where and who he was, but then it was all over and life snapped back to normal. Now he and Robin were working at Family Video, which was somehow even less cool than slinging ice cream for Scoops. 

By the time August had rolled around, the excitement of July was gone, and Hawkins had settled back into its sort of mournful calm default. The summer heat had settled, and Steve was relegated to days filled with mostly loneliness. There was Henderson, obviously, but the kid was busy most days, and one of his friends, Will, was moving away soon. So they got maybe one day to hang out a week, tops. And yeah, there was Robin, and she felt like the closest thing to a real friend Steve had in a long time. But again, Robin was busy with getting ready for college in a month and hanging out with her surprisingly large group of friends from band. She had invited him out with the group, but with a quick look-over at the lanky kids suspiciously eyeing him from the backseat of Robin’s Chrysler Valiant, he couldn’t get up the nerve to go. The thought of spending time with kids who he’d shoved around in the halls a few years back made him a little nauseous. 

A few days a week, he and Robin would ‘carpool home’. That’s always what they called it, at least, but it always ended up being hour long drives to anywhere. The Quarry, woodsy backroads, sometimes even to Munsee or Fort Wayne just to get a little change of scenery. Maybe smoke a little, listen to her favorite bands. Talk about random shit until they got tired or bored, and then drive, bleary and red-eyed, back to Robin’s to drop her off.  
Things were easy with her, in a way they never were with Tommy H. or Carol. With them, he was always performing, always thinking out his next five moves. He cared about what they thought of him in a weird, anxious way that lead to perfect hair and epic parties and shit that, if he was being totally honest, didn’t make him happy either. Things were easier with Nancy, but then he was so scared of screwing things up with her that he got in his head, did a full 180 and screwed things up worse. And things were easy with Henderson, but he was a kid and a responsibility and not someone who Steve could really talk to about things. But with Robin, it was like exhaling, like being alone except way more fun and less, you know… lonely.

They rarely talked about what was said in the mall bathroom. The day after it happened, Robin called Steve up. 

“Hey Dingus,” she said, and her voice was quiet. “Wanna go driving? I’m hungry.” 

And so they got drive-thru fast food junk, sat in the parking lot of the old Blockbusters, and ate in silence. Robin eyed his face, still puffy and bruised. 

“You gonna be okay?” she asked. 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just… nothing a little time and ice won’t fix, I guess.”

“I don’t mean your face, idiot,” she snapped. “God, is that all you think about?” 

“Hey, this is the moneymaker you’re talking about! How else would I reel in the ladies?” he joked, but Robin wasn’t smiling. She took a deep, pained breath. 

“About-”

“It’s fine.” he said, trying to derail the train he seemed to be trapped on. “Don’t even worry about it, Robin.” But she barreled forward, speech stilted like she was trying to remember talking points. 

“I just- you can forget any of it even happened, honestly. I’m not… I wasn’t thinking clearly. The drugs, the Russians, when they drugged us, I don’t think they had, like, washed out of the system. Yet. Because I wouldn’t have said any of that, honestly-” 

She was rambling. He let his head flop to the side and looked at her. Her hair was messy, like she hadn’t brushed it in days, and her eyes were sunken in, a little manic. Steve could tell she hadn’t slept. 

“Robin.” he said, softly enough to shut her up. She didn’t look over at him, instead seemed to be waiting for something to hit her. “It’s alright. I don’t care.” 

She exhaled, long and slow, before turning to face him. Her face was almost scarily unguarded. “You’re not mad?” she whispered. 

“No,” he answered, firm and true. She looked down and chewed on her lip, gearing up for another question. “And I won’t tell anyone. No one finds out. Promise.” She finally relaxed, letting her eyes flutter shut like she had just finished a marathon. 

“Thank you.”

There was quiet, then, but a comfortable quiet. Steve’s left eye pulsed with a hollow ache. He wondered when that would stop. 

“Your breath smells like fries.” Robin muttered, and they laughed. 

“Shit. We’re gonna need to find new jobs.”

And that was all they said about it. By now it was an unspoken thing, a secret they both held and understood the weight of. And honestly, Steve was grateful. He felt like he knew Robin better than he knew anyone, even Henderson, even better than he ever knew Nancy. They were friends, no chance of anything screwing it up or making it complicated or having her find out what a douche he really was. If he was honest with himself, the biggest emotion he remembered, over the smell of puke and bathroom cleaner and stale blood, was relief. 

It was mid-August, a few weeks away from Robin's move-in day. He had it marked on his calendar in big red letters so he wouldn’t forget, but it was always in the back of his head. She was going to IUPUI, in Indianapolis. A good school, by his standards, but he knew she was disappointed. She had wanted to get out of Indiana, which she called “The World’s Capital of Fuck-All Nothing”. Secretly, he was glad she wasn’t going to Stanford or Yale or any of the other schools on her list. He liked the idea of having her less than four hours away, able to visit if he needed.

Working with her was good, and Keith was nice enough to schedule them together most days. It was a Thursday, and their ten hour shift had finally ended. It was hot out, humid and cloudy, the kind of shit weather that made it hard to pull out a chair. 

“What are the plans for the night, Dingus?” Robin asked as she locked the door to the break room. “Gonna go get laid?” 

Steve snorted. “Yeah, right.” He didn’t hide his lack of dates from Robin anymore. He could blame it as much as he wanted on the Scoops Outfit, but the truth was his chances of picking up chicks was equally low at Family Video. His heart just wasn’t in it. Maybe it was Nancy, although if he was being honest with himself he knew that wasn’t it. He loved Nancy, he really really did, but he would be an idiot if he didn’t see that she belonged with Byers. The guy was moving away in a few months, and Steve barely cared, which was enough to prove to him that Nancy was a thing of the past. Maybe it was more that all the chicks were still in high school, ready to leave for college and forget about him. 

“Well, me and Tammy and Eric are gonna go meet some friends and hang out by the Quarry, if you want to tag along,” Robin offered. He shot her a smirk on the name Tammy, and she narrowed her eyes. “You coming or not?”

“Nah, no thanks.” No matter how many times Steve shot her down, Robin still always offered up her friend group to him. He appreciated that. “Have fun though. Don’t get kidnapped.”

“I don’t plan on it.” Outside, a blue Volkswagen Bug pulled up. Steve could see through the window that her friends were in the front seat. He recognized them loosely from school, knew at some point he probably made their lives hell. He hung back while Robin left, shooting him quick finger guns as she backed out through the door. 

Steve took another few minutes to clean up, and locked the front door. Closing shifts were always the worst, long and boring. The parking lot was empty and hot, the sticky humidity still lingering in the air. He climbed into his car, still dented from t-boning Hargrove a few months prior. So far, it had been able to keep staggering along, and Steve really didn’t want to explain to his father why the BMW was trashed. But when he tried the ignition, the engine gave a weak sputter and died out. 

“Shit,” he muttered, and tried again. Nothing. “Shit!” He smacked the steering wheel, letting his head fall back to the headrest. His parents were definitely going to find out now. And the more pressing issue was how he was going to get home at eleven o’clock at night. 

The walk was over five miles, and would take him hours, but there were no other options. Robin was out, Henderson was a child, and he certainly wasn’t going to call his parents for a ride. They weren’t home anyways. They never were.

But just as he was out of the parking lot, the Volkswagen peeled back into the lot, blasting music. The headlights swept over him, and he groaned. Robin and her friends. Somehow even worse than a long walk home. 

There was no hiding from them, and especially no hiding the giant BMW still very much in the parking lot. The bug parked, and Robin jumped out of the backseat. 

“Steve!” she yelled. “Where the hell are you going?” 

They met in the middle of the lot, under the lone parking light. “What are you doing here?” Steve asked. He was being pissy and he knew it, but the night hadn’t gone well so far. Robin raised her eyebrows at him. 

“I forgot my sweater in the break room, idiot. I made Eric drive back. What are you doing here?” She eyed the BMW. 

“Piece of shit won’t start. I’m walking home.” Steve did his best to make it sound like it was the only option. Robin looked at him like he was the dumbest living thing on the planet. 

“That’s like eighty miles away, dipshit, and it’s late. Just let us drive you home.” Steve sighed. It was useless, and he knew it, but he didn’t budge. He could feel Tammy and Eric’s eyes on him, staring from the inside of the Bug. He knew they hated him, and they had good reason to. Robin followed his gaze to the car and back, and rolled her eyes. “They don’t bite. Come on.”

Tammy drove, and Robin sat shotgun. Steve had made wild eyes at her, but she either didn’t get the hint or didn’t care, and now he was jammed in the backseat next to Eric. He definitely recognized this kid. His hair was jet-black, probably dyed, and spiked up in the front. He was wearing eyeliner, and there was a stud in his brow. Even sitting down, slumped over in his seat, he looked confident, self possessed. Steve looked out the window and watched his car disappear as Tammy rounded the corner.

He didn’t recognize the song that was playing. He could tell it was probably really good, but he didn’t understand a key aspect of it, like something else needed to click for the lyrics and the noise to come together. He felt like that a lot, especially around Robin. The movies she liked, the music, the art… he half-understood it, and came away feeling both stupid and stuck, like there was something lodged in his throat stopping his brain from working right. 

“-Steve!” Tammy’s sharp voice cut to the backseat. He jumped. 

“Yeah. Sorry. What?”

“We’re stopping at the quarry first. Eric can drive you home if you want, but Rob and I are gonna hang for awhile.” 

Steve nodded, flashing a tight-lipped grin. “Cool, cool. I’d appreciate a lift back, I’m pretty wiped out.” Robin gave him a thumbs-up, her eyes locked on Tammy. 

They pulled up to the quarry, where there were a collection of two or three cars already waiting. Steve could make out the ambience of a party; music, laughter, a few sharp screams. But the music was rougher, louder, and some skinny kid with glasses was sitting on one of the quarry rocks with a tuba, playing wildly while people cheered him on. 

Robin rolled out of the car, and was greeted with a few whoops of acknowledgement. Steve was struck with a sudden recognition- memories of junior year house parties. She was Queen Robin, ruling over the Band Dominion. But she seemed to enjoy it more than he ever did. Tammy was out of the car too, running towards the group and holding what Steve assumed was a bottle of alcohol. He almost wanted to stay, to hang out with Robin and the rest of them and throw rocks off the side of the quarry until sunrise. 

But he knew what would happen if he walked out there. 

Someone touched his knee, and he jerked his head over to see Eric leaning over him. He was wearing a heavy black jacket, which must have been hot in summer. It was covered in buttons, reading Iron Maiden, AC/DC, and the most frequent; Bowie, Bowie, Bowie all over the front. Steve realized he had been staring for a longer time than acceptable, and blinked away. 

“Harrington. We takin’ you home?” his voice was low, gravelly, and Steve was suddenly very uncomfortable. But after one look out at the party, the faces of kids whose backpacks he'd used as centerpieces in impromptu games of hallway catch, he knew which option he was choosing. 

“Shotgun?”

The ride to his house felt like it took way longer than it usually did. It must have only been fifteen minutes, but Steve’s heart was beating in his ears for what seemed like hours. As soon as they pealed out of the parking lot, Eric fiddled with the stereo for a few seconds. And suddenly, sound was pouring out of the speakers like water. Steve felt like he was in the deep end of a pool, like everything was slowed and he was just floating, perfectly still. He still didn’t get the music, didn’t understand what it all meant, but it ebbed through him like a tide. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it was pretty damn good. 

“Who is this, man?” he heard himself ask, voice muffled. 

“It’s Heroes, by Bowie,” Eric answered, and Steve was surprised to not hear a bit of judgement in his voice. 

“Wow.” Steve didn’t know what else to say. Eric laughed a little, and Steve felt whatever was stuck in his throat and clogging up his brain grow a little, stutter in place. Luckily, Eric spoke before Steve could think of anything stupid to say. 

“So how’d you end up hanging with Robin?” This time his voice was judgemental, but not in a rude way. In an accurate way, like How did Robin, who kicks ass and takes no shit, end up being able to tolerate King Steve? And it was hard for him to come up with an answer.

“Robin is the coolest person I’ve ever met,” was all he could say. Eric nodded wisely. 

“You’re right on that, man.” 

The next sentence came out before he could lose the nerve. 

“And I’m trying to be a better person than I’ve been.” It felt weird to say out loud. Some part of his brain was still stuck on admitting that he had ever been a douche, and he felt a part of himself cringe. 

“That’s good,” Eric said, not an insult but also not cutting any shit with him. Somehow, Steve felt relaxed, not antagonized. It was good, he thought. It was good of him to try to be better. 

“I’m sorry, man. If I ever did any shit to you.” Steve’s voice was slightly strained, but it felt like a weight was lifted out of his head. 

“Thanks, Harrington. I appreciate it.”

The music poured in, and the two of them drove. Eric’s nose stud glinted whenever a street light passed by, and Steve let his eyes drift over to his eyes, brown or hazel, maybe? It was hard to tell in the lowlight. But they were nice. Nice. Suddenly, Eric glanced over, and their eyes met. 

And the weight slammed back down. 

Steve kept his eyes down for the rest of the ride, even when the bumping and swaying of the car made him nauseous. 

No lights were on when Eric dropped him off. 

“This your place?” he asked, and Steve knew it was code for a long, loud Yikes. The yard alone betrayed the fact that no one had been home for awhile. The lawn spilled over, the bushes grew up over the windows. 

“Unfortunately.” The two of them sat for a second, sighed together. Then Steve reached for the door and stepped out. The night air had a welcome chill now. “See you around, Eric,” Steve called back towards the car. “Thanks for the lift.” 

“No problem,” Eric said back. Steve could hear the half-smile in his voice, and wished he couldn’t. “Check out Bowie sometime.”

Steve watched the car drive off, leaving him alone on his front lawn. The neighborhood around him was quiet, clean, neat. But at night, he just felt like he was on a soundstage. Nothing felt real, not like it did at Robin’s place near the trailer park. There, music was always playing from somewhere, no matter what time of night it was. There were dogs barking and people yelling - the sounds of inhabitation. Here, there were just crickets. 

The inside of the house was very cold and very quiet, and he couldn't help but feel like an intruder, breaking in after everyone else fell asleep. The whole place had honestly creeped him out since everything junior year, and he hated being there alone. Unfortunately, that’s how it usually was. 

Steve turned on the kitchen light to find piles of unwashed dishes. He knew he should take the time to do them, but sleep and guilt were tugging at the back of his mind. Instead, he poured himself a glass of water, drank it down, and added it to the pile in the sink. 

In the bathroom, he checked out his eye in the mirror. The swelling was gone, but the odd coloring was lingering on, along with the slight scar on the side of his mouth. Maybe it would never go away fully, and maybe he was okay with that, because in all honesty, it was almost nice to have it there. It was a reminder that something had happened to him, in the midst of all the nothingness that he seemed to be now. 

His bed was unmade, and the sheets gave off a sour smell, but again, he didn’t have the energy to change them. He’d take the time to clean at some point the next week, before his parents rolled back into town whenever they felt like it. The house, but especially his room, felt like it was digging its nails into his arm, keeping him still. Whenever he looked out the window of his room, he thought of Jonathon Byers taking photos of Nancy (which, for the record, was still creepy as shit, although the guy did apologize for it), thought of King Steve in junior year with his button-down shirts and khakis. He thought of Barb, like he always did, vanishing from the diving board above his pool. 

He felt so separate from that version of himself, enough to feel weirdly separate from himself when remembering things from that time. He found it hard to believe he ever fit in that seamlessly. Was he just stupid, that caught up in Nancy and Tommy H. and the rest of it that he just didn’t notice something was off? Or was he just that good at lying to himself? Because by now the lump in his throat had sunk down to his gut and made a home there. It had been in him since he met Robin, maybe, or since the shit with the Russians at least. But he had a suspicion that it had always been somewhere inside him, floating around in his blood, looking for a place to stick. 

He slept long enough to dream about amber eyes, instrumentations that echoed through his bones, and an audible half smile. He slept hard enough to forget it all before he woke up.


	2. Watch That Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin leaves for college, and Steve finds himself in a town that has suddenly grown much smaller and much harder to hide in.

The day before Robin left for Indianapolis, they drove for nine hours. Neither of them were scheduled to work, and at noon, just after Steve had finished washing dishes and mowing the lawn, the phone rang. 

Robin had a car, but Steve was always the one that drove. He didn’t want her to see his house - both because of how obviously empty and barren it was, and because it was so much bigger than hers. He found himself doing things like that often, trying to bridge the obvious gap between them. Mostly, it worked. When they were together, things like that tended not to matter. 

She lived in the more run-down side of Hawkins, a few streets over from the Byers’ house. Her house was blue, an almost offensively bright shade of blue, which she told him was her dad’s idea. From what Steve had gotten from their brief conversations on the matter, it was just her dad. But he was cool, she had stressed. He did things like paint the outside of their house too-bright blue and drive her to Chicago to see the New York Philharmonic on tour. But Robin also made sure he wasn’t around when Steve picked her up. She hadn’t exactly said why, but Steve figured it was to prevent her dad from thinking the BMW was the Bangmobile Express (a thought that now made him cringe). So he picked her up when her dad was out on a run, or at work, and Robin made up various other friends who she could theoretically be hanging out with on a Friday night. 

Steve couldn’t help but be a little jealous of her in that regard. His father was more of an idea than a person. He showed up infrequently (and usually pissed), made life shit for a few days, and then left. There were more business trips than business, it seemed, and his mom tagged along on all of them. 

He never told them about the car. He took it to a shop, and, with pretty much all the money he had earned for the entire summer, got the engine replaced and some body work. He had whined about it to Robin for weeks, but at least it was driveable now. He picked her up at three, and she ran across her front lawn like they hadn’t seen each other in months. 

She flung open the car door and propper her feet up on the dash. 

“Where to, mon chauffeur?” she asked, and then laughed wildly at the blank look on Steve’s face. 

“Jesus, Rob, are you already stoned?” 

“No, Dingus. It’s my last day before college, and therefore our last Aimless Drive. I’m excited.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and cupped her hands around her mouth. “I have news.” There was a glint in her eye, and Steve was suddenly very curious. 

“What?”

“I can’t tell you _now,_ then it wouldn’t be fun. Come on, let’s drive!”

Steve let her put on whatever music she wanted all afternoon. He almost protested, but he kept thinking about how he wouldn’t see her again until November, an unspeakably long time away, and then he figured there was no harm in listening to every Joni Mitchell song, again. 

They drove for hours, talking about random shit. Science teachers from sixth grade who were more than a little psycho, how screwed up college admissions are, it’s not Steve’s fault that school is just so much _work,_ all the shit that went down in the Russian lab, how insane it was that it had even happened. Every time one of them mentioned the bone saw, the doctors, the drugs, they would lose it all over again, laughing their asses off at the absurdity of it all. 

They drove all the familiar backroads, until the sun sank low in the sky and the clouds glowed gold. Joni Mitchell started up the album for the third time, and Robin reached over and turned it off. She sunk low in the seat, and stared out the window. 

“What’s up, Rob?” Steve asked. “You hungry or something?” She shook her head. 

“Just thinkin.”

“You wanna pull off somewhere?” There wasn’t a ton of scenery, just the same endless fields and sparse woods that spanned most of Indiana. But a few miles further, there was a little pull out to a ledge overlooking a corn field, painted hazy yellow. 

Steve reclined his seat, propped his feet up on the dash to mirror Robin. 

“So,” he started, a grin pulling at the edge of his mouth. “What’s this big news?” She twisted in her seat, covering her face with her hands, and Steve could see her cheeks turning red under her fingers. “What?” She turned to him, eyes wide. 

“Okay, okay, so. Yesterday me and a few friends rode around for awhile-”

“Was Eric there?” 

The words left before he knew how to stop them. Robin cocked an eyebrow at him. 

“Yeah? He was.”

“Sorry- doesn’t really matter-”

“Let me get to the point, Dingus,” she said, badly concealing an approaching wild grin. Steve nodded, trying to push back the wave of anxiety that had washed over his stomach. 

“So I was out with Eric and Tammy, and then Eric went home, right? So then I was just out with Tammy. Thompson. At the quarry.” Robin was smiling now, biting her lower lip. 

“Yeah?” He wasn’t getting something, he could tell. 

“Steve. We were alone. The _whole night_.” He nodded blankly, and Robin groaned. “Oh my GOD you idiot. Okay, okay, I will spell it out. She and I sat in my shitty AMC Rivera, and she was all like ‘I’m going to miss you so much, Robin! I should have spent so much more time with you!’” And we talked for like hours and we both got maybe a liiittle bit high.” When Robin said ‘a little bit high’ Steve knew that probably meant that she and Tammy were both blazed into another dimension. “And I don’t really remember what led up to it but all of a sudden - boom!” She clapped her hands, and Steve jumped backwards. 

“You shot her?” he whispered, already panicked.

“Steven! Boom! We _made out_.”

“What?!?” Steve rocketed up out of his seat. “Holy shit, Rob!” 

“I know, I know!” she yelled, and grabbed his hands. “She definitely remembers, too, because this morning she called me and said that when I got back in November, that we should _hang out_ -”

“Jesus Christ, Rob.”

“I know.” She grinned harder than Steve had ever seen her, and it suddenly struck him that she was letting him know before anyone else, and that probably said something about how close they were as friends. He fought the silly urge to hug her. 

“I can’t believe it!”

“Me neither! I kept thinking I was going to wake up!”

“Was it any good?”

“Uh- _yeah!_ It was insanely good.”

“Well, I mean, you were high. And it was your first kiss,” he teased. 

“It was not my first kiss,” Robin protested. 

“Wait, what?” 

“Um, band camp, Dingus. Every summer. Like at least half the girls at band camp are… you know.”

“Woah.” Steve hadn’t really considered how many people in the world were… you know. Robin was the first person he’d ever met who admitted to it. The thought that maybe there were more, that it wasn’t a one in a billion thing, like he’d thought, made something inside him feel weird. 

He’d heard about it, obviously, from when he was in elementary school. But it was just a thing said to pick on each other, to make fun of the kids who couldn’t run as fast. It was never an actual _thing_ , at least not until middle school, when all of a sudden it was a trap you could fall into, seemingly by doing anything slightly wrong. Luckily, Steve never had. He was the epitome of middle school perfection, something that made him a little proud even years later. 

“You gotta fill me in on Band Camp girl someday,” Steve muttered. 

“Multiple, actually,” Robin blushed. 

“Jesus, Rob. You’ve probably kissed more girls than me.” They laughed together until they were both lying down in the car seats, staring up at the sky, more blue now than gold. Steve felt something bubble up in his chest, something that had been there since they started talking- really, since the bathroom. 

“Hey Rob?” Steve asked, eyes closed so he wouldn’t lose his nerve.

“Yeah?” she said, and he could hear in her voice that her eyes were also closed. 

“How did you know?” 

“Know what?”

“That you were… you know?” He was half expecting a quick teasing joke of a response, but Robin was quiet for a second before answering. 

“I guess I just never got what was so great about boys. I mean, they were cool to hang out with and everything, but it was so simple in my head that girls were so much better. It was like… duh. Why would anyone want to hook up with guys? You know?”

Steve’s heartbeat slowed. He remembered eighth grade, making lists of all the hot girls in algebra with Tommy H. Sure, it was a shitty thing to do, but the point was that girls _were_ hot. He had loved Nancy, more than he’d ever loved anyone. He didn’t even know why he was worried about it. He wasn’t even sure what ‘it’ was. 

“Why do you ask, Steve? Thinking of lezzing it up with me?” Robin asked. It was a joke, but there was a layer of uncertainty under it. Like she was afraid of his answer. 

“Just wonderin’,” he muttered. “It makes sense.”

They sat like that for a while, just breathing. It wasn’t uncomfortable, something Steve didn’t think he could ever explain. He and Robin could just do that, in a way none of his other friends could. He didn’t have to give her the ‘I’ll Miss You Speech’, in the same way that she didn’t have to give him the ‘Thanks For Being Cool About The… You Know Speech’. The sky turned from blue to purple to black, and the stars shone out from everywhere above them. 

Eventually Robin asked if they wanted to start heading back, and Steve pulled the seat forward and buckled in. “You can pick the music,” she said, “Joni has spoken enough for today.”

He opened the glovebox and pulled out the top cassette. He’d gotten it from Woolworths a few weeks before, and it had been the only thing he listened to going to and from work. He’d listen on loop when he drove around by himself at night, and the pain on the back button on the radio was worn off from the amount of times he’d repeated track three. 

“Since when do you listen to Bowie?” Robin asked. 

“Dunno,” Steve answered, already slightly defensive. He didn’t want to explain why he’d bought the cassette, why he wouldn’t stop listening. He didn’t really get it himself, and had a suspicion that looking for the answer would lead to not great revelations. But Robin was already eyeing him with slight amusement. 

“Did Eric put you onto him?” Steve gripped the steering wheel a little harder. 

“I dunno, Rob. I just like the goddamn song, okay?” He was being a dick, he knew. But his head was pounding. 

“Jesus, okay. So do I.”

He drove in silence, as the songs cycled through and back again, until he reached Robin’s street. They looked at each other for a second, and Steve smiled awkwardly. He felt like there should have been some emotional moment then, where he told her how much their friendship meant to him, how she was the first person who looked at him and saw Steve the way he wanted to be seen. 

Instead, he said “Call me as soon as you get there. I want to know who all the hot chicks are.” Robin grinned at him, opened the door, and got out. She stuck her head back in to face him, and her eyes were soft. 

“I love you, Dingus,” she said, and Steve had to seriously focus hard to keep from tearing up. He refused to cry in front of Robin - he’d never hear the end of it. 

“Love you too, Rob,” he replied, and he barely kept the shake out of his voice. “I’m gonna miss you.” Sometimes speeches were worth giving. She smiled, waved once, and walked down the street towards her house. As she did, Steve heard her yell out to him.

“Eric’s staying in Hawkins this fall!”

Steve listened to Bowie all the way home, and for a few minutes, let himself cry. 

He had scheduled plans with Henderson that next day long before Robin left. It was a safeguard against him moping around his house and waiting for her to call. So he swung by the kid’s in the morning, said hello to his mother, and drove him to the arcade to meet with the rest of his little posse. 

“Is Robin at college yet?” Dustin asked, eating cereal out of a bowl he insisted taking with him on the road. 

“Yeah, she left today.” 

Steve didn’t have to look over to see the look the kid was giving him. It didn’t matter how many times he tried to stress it - Dustin would never believe that he and Robin were ‘just friends’. It at least made him smile that the kid was always on the defense for Steve, letting him in on tips and tricks of how to ensure she would fall head over heels in love. Ever since he got back from camp he was the self-proclaimed expert on all things romance. 

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, my friend,” he mused, and Steve had to stop himself from swerving into a tree to shut the kid up. “That’s why me and Suzie are so strong.”

“Yeah, you two’ve got a long life of happiness ahead.”

“You make fun, Steve, but I know you’re jealous.” 

“Why would I be jealous of a child and his girlfriend who is also a child?” 

Steve enjoyed bickering with Henderson. He reminded him of a little brother, in the sense that he didn’t think they could ever piss each other off enough to not want to hang out. And it was reassuring that the kid could still be normal Dustin, joking and cursing at him while spilling milk onto his car seat. 

Because the kids were different lately. Understandably so, Will had less than a month left before he was moving to Maine, which Dustin had ranted to Steve about for hours, because the Walkie-Talkie signal couldn’t even reach there. El, the girl who used to be able to move shit with her mind, was going with them, because Hopper had kicked it in the Russian Lab. And Max, the redhead, watched her own brother have his guts sucked out by a giant monster from another dimension. So yeah, they had a much more depressing vibe than they did before. 

Steve dropped Dustin off, gave him five bucks for the token machine, and told him to be good or he’d kick his ass. He watched through the car window as Will greeted Dustin with a hug. All of them hugged a lot more these days, he noticed. El always had an arm around Mike, leaning into his neck or playing with his hair. And if she wasn’t she was wrapping her arms around Max, who would show up to the arcade hangouts only briefly, sort of ghost around for a little, hug everyone, and leave. 

Steve stayed in the car, partly because he wanted the kids to have their space and partly because he knew it would be weird to be the only nineteen year old wandering around an arcade for children. Sure, it made him feel like a stay at home mom sitting in the car waiting for Dustin to wander back out to him, but if he was honest with himself he _was_ a stay at home mom. 

It was still weird to think about the fact that he wasn’t going back to school in a few weeks. Sometimes he felt like he had really stagnated, like all there was left to do was to stay in his parents’ house and become manager of the Family Video, get pudgy and develop a drinking problem and wait for Robin to stop calling. 

He was sitting there, staring absently at the game posters hanging on the brick wall when someone rapped their knuckles on his window. He whipped his head around, ready to tell Henderson that he wasn’t going to give him more money, get a goddamn job, but he stopped himself before any words came out. 

Eric’s hair looked lighter during the day. The sun glinted off the piercing above his right eyebrow, and Steve noticed that there was a thin metal hoop on the bottom of his nose. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed that before. He suddenly realized that Eric had asked a question. 

“Huh?” Steve asked dumbly, and he was aware of the hot blush creeping up his neck. 

“Since when are you a frequenter of the arcade, Harrington?” Eric asked. He was half-smiling, looking at Steve like he was doing something funny but didn’t know it. 

“Um,” Steve tried to find an answer while still processing what was happening. “My friend’s in there. I’m waiting on him.” _Friend_ sounded objectively cooler than _kid I babysit who happens to also be one of my closest confidants_ , so Steve chose the less true of the two statements. He briefly wondered why he was trying to sound cool for Eric, before burying the question before it could produce an answer. 

“Mind if I sit?” Eric asked, and Steve loosely gestured to the passenger seat. He felt like he was being set up somehow, like Tommy H. was about to jump out from behind the van next to him with a video camera. _Letting freaks into your car, huh? Is this what you’ve devolved to?_

Tommy wasn’t here, he reminded himself. He was in Massachusetts, at Harvard. His dad had gotten him in, obviously, just like Tommy always said he would. It was good to repeat that to himself a few times over. 

Eric opened the door and got in. Neither of them spoke, and for the first time, Eric also seemed nervous, unsure of where to put his hands or eyes. His eyes fell to the cassette player, and Steve felt his stomach turn over on itself. He was about to spit out a half-baked excuse, explain that it had nothing to do with anything, really, when Eric smiled to himself, and the words dissipated on Steve’s lips. Then quiet took over again, and Steve searched for anything to say. 

“So what’s been new with you?” he asked, which was probably the lamest thing he could have said. 

“Not a lot,” Eric said. “Mainly just witnessing everyone leave for college.” He glanced over at Steve a little sadly. “Is your move-in day soon?”

Steve let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah, right. I’m about five D minuses away from any college. I barely made it to graduation.”

“You’re kidding.” Steve leaned back in his seat and stared aimlessly at the arcade doors. 

“Wish I was.”

“Damn.” Eric chuckled. “Well, you made it about two years longer than I did.”

“You dropped out?”

“Yep. Soon as I turned sixteen.”

“Woah.” That aligned with Steve’s memories, if they were correct, of seeing Eric a few times in the hall freshman and sophomore year. He felt a lot better knowing that Eric hadn’t known him Junior year, the height of his douchebaggery. 

“So you've been listening to Bowie?” Eric asked through a knowing smile. Steve drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. 

“Here and there. Pretty good.” It was a lie, and an obvious one, and one look at Eric’s face let Steve know he hadn’t fallen for it. “Okay, yeah, all the time.”

“Just _Heroes_?”

“Yeah, I… is there more?”

Eric didn’t say anything, just opened his jacket and reached into the inside pocket. He pulled out three cassettes, lying each of them on the dashboard. _The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory,_ and _Aladdin Sane_. Steve picked them up, stared at the covers, the wild colors. 

“You just have these around?” he muttered. 

“For my Walkman,” Eric explained. “But you can borrow them for awhile.” 

“No, these are yours. I can’t just…” 

“It’s cool. I don’t mind.” Eric smiled at him. It was funny how Eric could look so hardass on the outside, like he’d clock you for looking at him, but the smile would change it all. It was a good smile. Honest. 

“Are you sure?” Steve asked, although he was already running his thumb over the cover of _Aladdin Sane_. Bowie’s eyes were closed, and there was a lightning bolt painted across his face. His hair was bright, artificial red, and swooped up in a mullet. But what Steve noticed most were his eyelids, painted pink. And his eyelashes were painted too, however it was that girls did it. He’d seen the album cover before - he wasn’t an idiot, he’d been to stores. But he’d never seen it before. He felt like he was holding something illegal. 

“See? You’re already a fan,” Eric said. 

Steve swallowed, and nodded. 

It was then that Eric’s eyes travelled upwards, and Steve turned to see Dustin staring into the car. 

“Steve! I’m ready to go!” he called, glancing at Eric with confusing and slight apprehension. 

“Ah, shit,” Steve held up his finger to Dustin and mouthed ‘one second’. He turned back to Eric, who was smiling incredulously, eyes wide. Steve sighed. “Yeah. That literal middle schooler is in fact my friend.”

“That is ridiculous.”

“I am aware.” He knew Eric had to leave now. Dustin had to be driven home, and Steve had to go home and sleep to be ready for work tomorrow. But he didn’t want to stop talking to Eric. Something in his chest held him down. It reminded him of when he was first dating Nancy, how he wanted every last minute to be the second-to-last. 

He realized he’d been staring at Eric for too long. He kept doing that. 

“Hey,” Eric started, and grabbed a pen from inside his jacket (what didn’t he carry in his jacket, Jesus). “I’m gonna need those cassettes back eventually, right?” Steve nodded. Eric held out the pen, and Steve took it without thinking. But Eric kept holding his hand out, turned it palm-up. His fingernails were painted jet-black. 

Steve held the pen out, unsure of what to do. Eric leaned a little forward. “Write your number, I’ll call you sometime this week.”

“To get the cassettes back,” Steve stated, shallow breaths clouding his brain. 

“Yep,” Eric said, nodding at Steve like he was the slowest person in Indiana. 

Steve reached up to cup the back of Eric’s hand with his own (so he could write better). His fingertips grazed Eric’s knuckles, and he felt like his hands were made of static electricity. When he pressed up, Eric pressed back, and he half-expected his hair to stand on end, like in freshman year science with Mr. Clarke and that weird machine.  
With sweaty palms, he scribbled out his number, screwing up the five and having to cross it out and write again. He pulled away, and his hands felt like they were on fire, like the electricity had been trapped there and now he was aware of every square inch of his skin. 

Eric read the number on his hand and grinned back at Steve. “See you soon, Harrington.”

He got out of the car. Steve stared at the place where he’d been, regaining his breath and regulated heart rate. 

“Who the hell was that?” Dustin opened the door and hopped in. Steve felt like he’d been yanked back down to the ground, enough to make him scoop up the cassettes and shove them into the glovebox. His blood was still pounding in his ears, and he felt a hot wave of embarrassment, although he wasn’t sure why. 

“Eric. One of Robin’s friends,” he said as he pulled out of the arcade parking lot. 

“Oh.” Dustin nodded, and Steve could tell he thought that his uncomfortableness was linked more to the painful memory of Robin’s departure than anything else. “You’re better than him, anyways.” 

“Sure, sure. Thanks. You have fun?”

“Yeah! Mike got the third-highest score on Galaga, and it only took him like four tries.”

After he dropped Henderson off, Steve drove back to his house and paced back and forth in the living room. After eight, it was clear Robin wasn’t calling today, and neither was Eric. He grabbed a beer and stalked up to his room, the cassettes tucked into his pocket. He turned the volume on his boombox up as loud as he could without waking the neighbors, popped in _Aladdin Sane_ , and lied on his bed. 

_Shaky threw a party that lasted all night  
Everybody drank a lot of something nice._

Steve rubbed his palm absentmindedly, trying to piece together his thoughts. Everything kept getting interrupted by flashes of metal rings, black polish, knowing smiles. His fingers shook, like they had been tense for hours. Hadn’t they? He’d gripped the steering wheel so strong on the way home that his knuckles were white. 

His brain echoed around the thought from hours ago: It reminded him of when he was first dating Nancy. It was stupid, meaningless. He hadn’t felt nervous like this with Nance. He felt the opposite with her- strong, insurmountable, like he could take on the world. But he couldn’t deny that something was happening now. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, name it. But he was lying in his bed on a weekend night, listening to music that Eric had put into his hand a few hours earlier. He hadn’t thought of anything since. 

_Watch that man, oh honey, watch that man.  
He talks like a jerk but he could eat you with a fork and spoon._

Steve closed his eyes, fingers still sliding over his palm again and again. He sat and waited for a phone call or the end of the album, whichever came first. 

He was so, _so_ fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading Chapter 2! I'm really busting out the David Bowie references, and I don't think that will end anytime soon. I'm having a blast writing this, and always appreciate feedback and comments! Stay safe and stay healthy :)


	3. Space Oddity

It took Robin six days to move on from Tammy and hook up with a girl, which beat Steve’s record by around a million weeks. The girl’s name was Cassidy, and Robin said she had short blue hair buzzed to her scalp. Steve couldn’t picture her as a real person, just as a conglomerate of images in his head. Blue hair, buzzed, girl, tongue pierced. Wore a lot of denim, Robin said. They weren’t ‘girlfriends’ yet, but from how Robin talked about her, it was only a matter of time. Steve was happy for her, really. 

“So you were right, then,” Steve said, lying on his bed in mid-October, twisting the phone cord through his fingers. “There are more out there.” 

“More? Of?” 

“People who are… you know.” He turned over, staring out of his bedroom window. Outside, there were a few trees, a streetlight, and a view onto the Davidsons’ porch. He tried to imagine city streets, cars, people milling around sidewalks. Even then, he couldn’t figure out where people like Robin would fit. 

“So many, Steve,” she promised, her voice tinged with tin, traveling over miles and miles of phone line. It was easy for her to say, looking at Cassidy’s dimpled smile. It wasn’t as easy for him.

He tried his hardest to believe she could be telling the truth. 

He didn’t admit it to himself, but he knew what it was. Absentmindedly stocking the shelves at Family Video, he’d think of what movies Eric might like. Driving through Hawkins at night, aimless, taking the same turns five times over, he tried to pick out which house could be his, which bedroom window he could be looking out of. The same cassettes on repeat, the same songs he mouthed the words to. The palm of his left hand, where he still ran his fingers over the grooves of his skin before sleep. 

He called after a week and a half. Steve wasn’t home, which he was almost grateful for. He got back after a night of driving and saw the message light was blinking. His heart leaped, like it did every time, like it did no matter who was on the other end of the line. He was used to picking up the phone and hearing Robin’s clear and warm voice, used to the well of disappointment that quickly dried when she started talking about the newest coffee place she found or the guy in the dorm above her who won’t stop playing heavy metal at two o’clock in the morning. 

But this time, when the voicemail tone played, a different voice filled Steve’s living room. 

“Hey, man,” it said. “It’s Eric.” 

Steve called back immediately after listening to the message. He sat down as the phone rang, his back against the fridge, and when he heard the soft _click_ of it being picked up, he tried his hardest to sound put together. 

“Did you listen to them?” Eric asked, and his voice sounded purposefully quiet, like he was whispering. 

“Yeah. They’re good. They’re really good.” Steve felt like he should be whispering too, so he lowered his voice, even though there was no chance anyone was going to hear him. 

“So,” Eric continued, and then paused. 

“So.”

Then Eric laughed, higher than Steve would’ve guessed, a little like giggling. “Sorry,” he breathed once it had passed. “It’s just… it’s still so weird to talk to you like a person.”

Steve winced. “Yeah. It’s still weird for me to deserve it.” He hated thinking that Eric had memories of him from a few years back, that those were the first impressions of Steve in his head. Steve ‘the Hair’ Harrington. Steve the Dick, more like. 

“It’s okay, though,” Eric said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I’m enjoying myself.” Steve smiled, not really a conscious smile, just something that slipped out. He knew what to ask next, the same way he knew what to say to Nancy to get her to roll her eyes and lean in for another kiss. 

“So do you want to hang out sometime?” Steve asked. “I mean, to give back the cassettes.” He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. Whispering didn’t feel so meaningless anymore, now that he was terrified there could be someone in the house listening in. Maybe his parents got home early from Maryland, maybe Carol was going to sneak in through the back door with a recorder, maybe it was all a setup to get him to embarrass himself in the way he always knew he was capable of-

“Yeah, to give back the cassettes, sure.” But Eric’s voice was kind, lightly teasing. He took a breath. 

“Okay.”

“They’re kickass albums.” 

“I know.”

They agreed to meet on a Tuesday, after Steve’s Family Video shift. He would swing by Eric’s house (the address of which was scrawled in a post-it note kept in Steve’s wallet) and they would go somewhere. They hadn’t decided where yet. He figured they would decide together, a prospect that made him excited and nervous.

Steve knew in the back of his head that something fundamentally irreversible was happening. He still hadn’t sat down with himself and said anything solid, but there was a difference between playing Bowie alone in his car for hours on end and… and whatever _this_ was. This was something he couldn’t or wouldn’t name. 

The sun was setting earlier, and the clocks were going to be set back in a week or two. Steve got off work at five, but by the time he drove down Eric’s street, the sun was already sinking behind the trees, painting everything a vague hazy gold. 

Eric’s house wasn’t at all near the streets he drove down. It was tucked away in the far northwest corner of Hawkins, down a dirt path through the forest. Steve passively thought that it could be a trap, and there could be a group of neighborhood kids waiting in the middle of the woods, waiting to kick his ass. 

But it was just a house. A little house, barely a house, honestly, but still just a house. It was brown, cabin style, A-frame, like something you’d see in the 70s. In the driveway was the blue Bug that Steve had first heard _Heroes_ in, and he felt relaxed just looking at it, just being sure he was at the right place. The fall leaves were in their prime, orange and red and screaming yellow, and the little driveway was littered with them. He pulled in and waited, the engine of the car keeping a quiet hum under his seat. He re-checked the post-it note for the hundredth time. The date was right, the time was right. The address, he was confident, was right. 

And suddenly there was a tapping at his window. Eric was good at that, at catching him off-guard. He looked how he always did. Good. Nice. Steve couldn’t think the word ‘pretty’. That would be too much, too hard to push past. But he knew. 

Steve opened the car door, and Eric grinned without showing his teeth. His cheeks were red, like he’d been standing out in the cold or exercising. His arms were crossed in front of him. He looked more nervous than Steve had ever seen him. His hair was still spiked, black, and the metal hoop under his nose still shone like a little lightbulb.

“Hey,” Steve said, and ran out of anything else to say. It was so hard to think of things that felt right, things that weren’t stupid or awkward or a little but too true. He settled on holding out the cassettes in front of him, like he was dealing Eric cards. 

Their fingers touched when he took them. Steve felt each square inch. 

“Wanna come in?” Eric asked, loosely gesturing to the house behind him as if he could mean anywhere else. Steve nodded, and Eric made his way back towards the front door. There was a small porch jutting out, all painted deep brown, and they climbed a few steps to get to the sliding door where Eric took off his shoes. Funny. Steve never took off shoes in his house, just ended up tracking mud and leaves wherever he stepped. 

The inside of the house was sparse, a ratty couch and boxy 30-inch television on a floor that was empty save for a long, spindly spiral staircase coated in thick shag rug. In one corner was a beige mini-fridge, and in the other was a small nightstand with a stereo. The walls had posters hung on them; Bowie, AC/DC, some movie called the _Rocky Horror Picture Show_. Steve was pretty sure Robin had told him about it at some point. There were a few plants by the windows, a tall light by the couch. There was an open door, behind which was a small sink and assumed the rest of a bathroom. He realized with painful obviousness that Eric lived alone. He figured, in a weird way, he did too. 

“You have a nice place,” Steve murmured, craning his neck to look up the stairs. 

“Thanks,” Eric said, rubbing his left toe over one of the hardwood beams. He didn’t look up, and when Steve looked back at him he was grimacing like he was in pain.

“I mean it,” Steve repeated, and Eric nodded, let out a little breath. Steve reached up to touch the leaves of one of the plants hanging from the ceiling. “What is this, fern?”

“Bromeliad,” Eric answered. 

“Huh?”

“It’s just a houseplant. I like gardening. And the winters are long here, so.” Eric looked out the back window, and Steve could make out the frame of a planter box. Something about what Eric had said made him stop and think. 

“You didn’t always live here?” he asked. Eric pursed his lips and shook his head. 

“Nope. Moved from Georgia when I was thirteen,” he said.

“What’s Georgia like?” Steve asked, sinking down to sit on Eric’s couch. It was more comfortable than he thought it would be.

“Mainly shit. Where I lived was shit, at least. But Atlanta is cool. It’s good for growing plants, but not good for growing up. You know?” Eric moved closer to the couch, and for a second Steve thought he was going to sit next to him, but instead he took a step back and sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor. 

“Hawkins isn’t good for either of the two, so,” Steve said. Eric laughed and shook his head. 

“That is certainly true.”

And it was. Hawkins was too small to be interesting, too big to have community. Too cold to be warm, too sticky to be comfortable inside. Too much of either/or, always a question of the lesser of two evils. Kill or be killed. 

“You ever wanna go back to Georgia?” Steve asked. 

“Not sure. I want to go… lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“Wyoming, Seattle, Canada, Europe, Asia. Africa. San Francisco.” Steve hadn’t thought a lot about going places. But as Eric listed places, Steve could picture the mountains, the ocean, the city streets. It all seemed so big, so painfully far from Hawkins. 

“What do you want to do?” Steve asked, which seemed like the logical following question. 

“I want to be a florist,” he said, and Steve grinned. Eric, all sharp edges and angry colors, misting plants and picking flowers. It made sense, in a weird way. Like it made sense how his smile was so soft, laugh was so high. “What about you?”

Steve closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. “I got no goddamn clue.” 

Eric leaned back on his hands, lowered himself down until he was lying flat on his back in the middle of the room. He still seemed tense, like he was trying to make peace with two converging realities, one of which had just walked right into the other. “You can put something on, if you want,” he mumbled, jerking his right arm in the direction of the stereo. 

So Steve put on Bowie, skipped to track #3, and sunk back to the couch, putting up his feet. He felt like he’d just smoked, although he knew he hadn’t. But he felt the same way, like reality was slightly off, like he was looking at things in a new way. 

At some point, he knew, he was going to have to face what was going on. Why he was jittery, sweaty hands and damp forehead, in Eric’s living room. But for now, he couldn’t. In the same way village people still dance the night before invading armies catch up to them, Steve let the music wash over him, a welcome shock. 

“I, I will be king,” he sang, off-key. “And you, you will be queen.” 

“Though nothing will drive them away,” Eric responded, in key, of course. “We can beat them, just for one day.” 

“We can be heroes,” Steve called, and he picked up volume, throwing his hands back behind his head. “Just for one day.” And Eric joined in, their voices a perfect mismatch. Steve suddenly leapt from the couch, running a hand through his hair. He would be King. King Steve, with the old-money confidence that came from being him, that came bloodstained at the hands of kids who weren’t as good at pretending. But it was okay- like the song said; just for one day. 

“And you!” He pointed at Eric, still on the ground, eyes wide. With the hand that wasn’t pointing he made a microphone from his first. “You can be mean. And I, I’ll drink all the time.” His voice was louder than the song, even, not cartoonish or funny. He was being sincere, in the way only King Steve could sell, horrible and charming and sincere. 

King Steve knelt down, and without speaking, Eric reached out his hands and let Steve pull him up. He felt every muscle, every tendon in Eric’s hands push back. They stood, hand holding hand, in the center of the living room, laughing. Steve knew what was going to come next- the dancing, the yelling the next lyrics-

_‘Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact._

_Shit_. Steve opened his hands like they’d been burned, let Eric stumble back a few steps. There was a brief blink of surprise on his face before it clouded over into guarded disappointment. 

_Yeah, we’re lovers, and that is that._

Steve spun around and pressed the stop button. The silence in the room echoed over the walls, over the Bro-mill-whatever, over Eric. 

“Sorry,” Steve muttered, but it didn’t sound real. Eric shook his head, like it wasn’t a big deal, but Steve wasn’t stupid. Neither spoke. Steve heard his breathing, heavier than it should have been. 

“Maybe I should go,” Steve said, and Eric opened his mouth and closed it again. Swallowed. Nodded. Steve felt like his veins were full of cement, sticking him to where he was. He kept standing there, staring at Eric’s face. He looked hesitant, like at any point he thought Steve would reach over and hit him, maybe like he already had.

He had such good eyes. Nice ones. _Shit_. He turned to the door.

“Hey,” Eric said, and Steve froze again. He moved to the stereo, and Steve tensed a little before realizing he wasn’t going to play the song again. Instead, he was opening a drawer, pulling out three more cassettes that he stuffed into Steve’s hands. He closed his fingers around them, stuffing them into his coat pocket. 

Steve ran his tongue along his bottom teeth, searching for something in the pockets of his molars that he could say that was close enough to what he meant. 

He settled on, “Do you have a pen?”

Eric’s number seared the skin of his palm like fire. When Steve got home, he scrawled it into his parents’ phonebook, three separate post-it-notes, and just in case, on a little patch of wall above his bed frame. 

The albums were _David Bowie, Diamond Dogs_ , and _The Man Who Sold the World_. On the cover of that last one, Bowie was draped over a table, in a cream and blue dress. His hair was long, curled, framing his face. Steve closed the cassette in his bedside table drawer, shoved under old gum wrappers, headphones, and crumpled up notes from junior year chem. 

For a minute, Steve contemplated just saying screw it and leaving. Never calling Eric back, moving to some small corner of Antarctica where no one could ever find him. But he knew it was useless. He needed to see this thing out, to whatever end it had, even if it was the end he was pretty sure it was going to get. 

He called Eric the next day. It went to voicemail. 

“Hey man. It’s Steve. Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. Didn’t feel too well.” He was lying, and he knew it, and he knew Eric knew it too. But it seemed like the easiest thing to do. “I was wondering if we could drive around sometime this week, give the tapes a listen. What the hell, ya know? Okay, gimme a ring back. I’m free whenever.” Also a lie, but Steve knew that he would make himself free whenever Eric wanted him to.

It had gotten that bad. He still refused to name it. But he knew whatever it was, it was growing. Robin was noticing. He was zoning out during their calls, she would repeat questions three or four times. She thought he was high, and he let her think that. Every so often she would say that he needed to get new friends.

“The child doesn’t count,” she would add, before he could bring up Dustin. 

And it wasn’t like he even _could_ bring up Dustin, because the kid was noticing something was off, too. When Steve drove him to Mike’s house, he felt his eyes bore holes in his head. 

“Did something happen with Robin?” he asked Monday afternoon. Steve just rolled his eyes and cranked the radio up. 

“You know-” Dustin yelled over the music. “-You just need to communicate with her! Tell her you need some space for self-growth, and she’ll let you off the hook for anything. Chicks eat that up.” 

“You haven’t met Robin,” Steve said. 

She was having fun at college, and he tried his best to be happy for her. It didn’t really work. He seemed to be the only kid left in Hawkins, the only one who was dumb enough to slack off second quarter of junior year and end his high school career with a 2.8 GPA. Nancy was gone, off at USC studying journalism. Tommy H. was in Boston, Carol was off wherever she could be the center of attention. Everyone he knew had left him behind, and he was alone with Eric, alone with a ticking bomb somewhere between the folds of his brain.

He took a week to call Steve back. 

It was a truly awful week, a week where Steve barely left his house in fear of running into Eric at the store, at the arcade, wherever. He was convinced Eric hated him, or worse, was telling everyone how Harrington fell for it. How that thing everyone secretly suspected about him might have been true all along. And the whole time he just wanted to see Eric, just wanted to sit in the same room as him and talk a little. They were locked into each other’s orbits, on a mutually assured collision course. 

But he called back. Late at night when Steve was lying in bed, listening to the albums again. Steve leapt out of bed and crashed through the hallway and down the stairs in the direction of the phone, and picked up on the fourth ring, out of breath. He knew, somehow, the sound of his ring.

“Hey.” He said. “You called.” It was a wish more than a statement. 

“Steve-” Eric sounded exhausted. 

“Come over?” he interrupted. He didn’t want to know what Eric meant. He just wanted to see him. To make things right. 

“What?”

“Can you come over? To my house?” He didn’t respond. “We could go for a drive.” 

“Steve.”

“I know. I know, and I’m sorry. But please.” He closed his eyes, not wanting to catch his reflection in the darkened window across the living room. “Please.” He hated begging, hated asking more than once. 

“Alright,” Eric said, and his voice sounded a little more normal, a little deeper. A little nicer. “I’ll be over soon.”

Steve could have cried, if he was someone who let himself do that without careful consideration. “Thank you,” he said, and Eric hung up. And Steve was alone, holding the receiver to his chest, hoping that no one but him could hear his heartbeat.

They drove in silence. Neither of them put on any songs. Eric leaned back in the passenger seat and Steve was hyper-aware of how close they were. The air felt spiked with electricity, like a lightning bolt could cut him down at any moment and leave him dead. They tracked up and down the same roads, driving circles and loops. Minutes passed, maybe hours. It felt like years. It was hard to take after a while.

“Where do you wanna go?” Steve asked. He glanced over to Eric, but it was too dark to make out his head, let alone his expression. 

“Where are you willing to drive?” It was the first thing Eric had said all night. His voice was nice, like butter and honey, like something warm. 

“Wherever you want.” And it was true. 

So Steve drove to the Quarry, bleary red eyes and tired head running low on excuses. The car parked, two headlights shining out over the cliffside. The moon hung low in the sky, and hundreds of feet below its dimmed reflection shone back. 

“Why’d you call me back?” Steve asked, voice barely above a whisper.

“I dunno,” Eric breathed back. “I guess I just wanted to see you.” 

The words hit Steve with the weight of a confession. He chewed on his lip, let his head fall to the side to face Eric. It was so dark, but he could still see his nose ring glinting, could still see the soft curve of his jawline. It felt like there was a pit growing in his stomach, that his intestines were being sucked into bit by bit. 

“Why?” It was all he could think to say. 

“Steve, do I have to say it?” 

His legs were being pulled into the pit, muscles sore from being so tense. Every nerve in his body was on high alert. He felt like at any second someone was going to jump out from behind the car, shine a light in his eyes. 

“I don’t remember you from school,” Steve said, and he didn’t know where the words were coming from or why. “I mean I sort of do, I like knew that I knew you, but… I don’t remember if we had any classes together or anything. And it’s shitty.” 

“Steve-”

“I was such a douchebag, and I still act like a douchebag sometimes, and… if you don’t want to hang out with me because of that, I get it. I understand.”

“Steve, I don’t-”

“But I’m trying, I’m trying really really hard to be a better person. And I love- being around you. You’re so… you’re not afraid. Of what people are going to think, and you listen to cool shit and you-”

“Steve.” And Eric’s hand wrapped around Steve’s wrist. And Steve didn’t let go. “I don’t remember you either.” Steve’s eyes had adjusted to the light enough for him to see that Eric was grinning. 

“What?”

“Royalty doesn’t really matter to the townsfolk. I knew who you were, but I didn’t care who you were. Because I didn’t care what people thought about me. And, for the record, I still don’t care who you were. I care who you are.” 

Steve didn’t think. He couldn’t, really. It was a dream- it had to be. He was exhausted, half delusional, tense in every muscle. And Eric’s hand was resting on his wrist, and he felt like he was noticing his skin for the first time. This is my arm, this is my wrist. 

“I care who you are, too,” his mouth said. 

Eric’s hand withdrew, and the place it had been felt very cold. Steve watched as he popped the glovebox and took out a cassette - _David Bowie_ , the earliest of the bunch. Watched as he popped it into the radio, pressed a few buttons, and turned the volume up. 

Steve knew this song. He’d known it for a long time, long before he saw Eric. He’d heard it in his mom’s car, playing over the loudspeaker at malls, at the slow quiet parts of school dances. Maybe he hadn’t always noticed it was there, but it was. And it was only going to get louder. 

_Ground Control to Major Tom_

Steve could see Eric’s face clearly now. His eyes were brown or hazel, not that there was really a difference. 

_Ground Control to Major Tom_

They were pretty. Pretty eyes. Eric had pretty eyes. 

_Take your protein pills and put your helmet on_

Maybe if he was less tired he would have been freaking out. Maybe if he was willing to put up more of a fight he would have told Eric to leave. 

_Ground Control to Major Tom_

_Ten_. Instead, he pushed his hand forward until he found Eric’s, and laced their fingers together. _Nine_. Eric sighed, an exhausted, relieved, beautiful surrender. _Eight_. Steve moved forward in his seat, not caring about saying the right words anymore. _Seven_. “You have pretty eyes,” he said. _Six_. 

_Commencing countdown, engines on_

“You have pretty hair,” Eric said, his voice far away and quiet, like he was telling Steve a secret. _Five_. And Eric’s other hand moved up and behind his neck, to comb through Steve’s hair, and this was Steve’s neck, Steve’s hair, Steve’s body. _Four_. And they pulled closer, slowly, like galactic objects, with the steady certainty of inevitability. _Three_. 

_Check ignition and may God’s love be with you_

At some point Steve had brought a hand to Eric’s face. _Two_. He only realized as his thumb touched Eric’s lips, ran along his jawline, cupped behind his ear. _One_. In the back of Steve’s head, a stray voice told him this was self destruction, this was the event horizon. 

And there they were, tidally locked, binary stars. 

_Liftoff_. 

When Steve first kissed a girl, he was twelve. Holly Harper had asked him to the Sadie Hawkins’ dance, and he kissed her behind the bleachers while Tommy H. watched guard to make sure no chaperones were coming. Steve had known exactly what to do, what to say, the right place to put his hands. She had giggled and called him an idiot and her lips tasted like cherry Chapstick, and it had felt the way it was supposed to. 

When Steve first kissed Eric, he was without coordinates. His body was on fire, electric and burning, and it was like nothing he’d felt before. _As though nothing could fall_ , he thought, and he believed it in that moment. He believed that it would stay that way forever; Eric’s lips on his, hands in hair and these were Steve’s lips, this was Steve’s forehead, neck, mouth, this was the difference between supernova and black hole. 

_For here  
Am I sitting in a tin can  
Far above the world  
Planet Earth is blue  
And there’s nothing I can do_

Maybe it was hours, maybe it was minutes. When Eric pulled away, the moon was still hanging over the Quarry. The clock still read a little past one. Eric kept a hand in Steve’s hair, twirling a curl around his finger. It was the one thing that felt real.

If Steve weren’t so far gone, so tired, he would have felt sick. He would have felt shame well up inside him like a rogue wave. But it was safe here, even if it wasn’t safe anywhere else. 

“Steve,” Eric whispered, and that was all. 

“Eric.” 

“We’ve done it now,” and he was only half-joking, tracing lazy circles over Steve’s scalp. “We’ve done ourselves in.” 

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, barely audible, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking to Eric or himself. Eric sat up a little, looked him in the eye. 

“Don’t be sorry. There’s no reason to be sorry.”

“I could have said no.”

“Did you want to say no?”

“No. I didn’t.” 

“So don’t be sorry. We both could have said lots of things.”

 _Letter to Hermione_ played in the empty space around them until Steve turned it off. Eric’s fingers were still caught in his hair, Steve’s hand was latched into Eric’s other.  
“How long have you known?” he mumbled. 

“Known what?” Eric responded. 

“That you were… you know.”

“I’ve known I was gay since I was thirteen.” The word hit Steve like a bullet. He loosened his grip on Eric’s hand. “How about you?”

“I’m not gay,” he said, instinctively. A reflex. 

“Steve,” Eric sighed, raising his eyebrows at him. Shifting a little in his seat, closer to Steve, as if to say _Look at us right now._

“I’m not.” It felt true when he said it. Or half-true. Or something. He felt more lost than angry. 

“Okay,” Eric said. He sounded like he believed him, or at least believed that Steve believed it. “You’re not gay.”

Steve suddenly launched forward, bringing a hand behind Eric’s neck, and kissed him. He tasted like nighttime, like Altoids, like chewing gum. He’d never kissed anyone before, he realized. Not really. Not without planning it. 

“I’m going to fall asleep,” Steve whispered. “I think I need to drive back home.”

“Okay,” Eric whispered back. 

They didn’t play any music. Steve was tired, but he was also starting to feel panicked, a rising tide. He knew in the morning it would be worse. He tried to keep it down for now, at least until he got to sleep, at least until Eric left. And the panic subsided when Eric reached over and put a hand on his knee, Steve leaning into the casual touch like it wasn’t a big deal, like it wasn’t the biggest deal. 

Steve parked on the street, so Eric could back the Bug out easy. Steve’s porch light was on- he must have forgotten to turn it off in the rush to get to Eric. _You’re so, so fucked,_ His brain echoed again, the hourly reprise. Maybe he was. Maybe that was fine. 

Eric opened the car door and swung out, and Steve followed. He circled around the car, and then they were standing out in the October cold. The street was quiet, white picket fences, a peaceful cul-de-sac. He hated it, so much, so suddenly. He hated the pretty little houses and the crickets and the perfect lawn that he knew was secretly artificial. 

“See you tomorrow?” Eric asked. “I mean, if you want to.”

“I want to,” Steve said, and grabbed Eric’s hand. “You know I want to.”

Either Steve leaned in, or Eric leaned in, but however it happened they were kissing again, Eric up against the car door. They knew that tomorrow wasn’t something either of them could promise, and so they didn’t. So they held onto the last string of the night, striking a match over and over in search of the same flame. 

Steve was about to ask Eric if he maybe wanted to come in, if he maybe wanted to stay with him for a little longer, when Eric’s eyes went wide. Suddenly Steve was being thrown off, stumbling backwards on the concrete. Steve turned to see the porch light still on, and under it, she stared at the both of them, with a look that let Steve know that she had seen it all, his mom. 

If he listened closely, he could hear all around him the sound of the inevitable fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed! It's been so long since I've written anything this ~spicy~ so hopefully it wasn't horrifically awkward. Sorry it took so long for the upload, it was just a hard nut to crack.


	4. Quicksand

Steve sat, hands clasped in front of him, staring at the surface of the dining room table. His mom paced back and forth behind him, and he could hear her murmuring to herself the way that she did when she was trying to figure out what to say. The surface of the table was dark brown, shellacked, and he could see the outline of his father’s face in the reflection. He looked- not happy. 

Eric had run, which Steve understood. He’d ran to the Bug and drove away, while Steve and his mom stood, completely frozen. If Steve could have plied his feet from the ground, he’d have run too. Now he was just sitting, hoping that if neither of them talked for long enough the whole thing could be ignored. 

“Steven,” his mom started, still pacing. “You know you can tell us anything.”

He laughed sharply. “Sure, yeah.”

“Hey.” His father’s voice always had a way of being booming, even when he wasn’t yelling. “It’s true.”

“Who was that boy?” his mom asked. 

“No one,” he muttered. 

“No one my ass.” His father pushed back in his chair and stood, planting his hands flat on the table in front of him. “You tell us who the hell he was, and then we can sort this thing out. Because _that kid,_ whoever he was, this is his fault. Okay? Not yours.”

Steve felt like he was dreaming. He lifted his head and looked his father in the eye, and was surprised to find not anger, but sympathy. He actually thought he was helping Steve here, thought that Steve would jump at the chance at throwing Eric under the bus. He felt sick, thick nausea bubbling up in his stomach. 

“Honey,” his mom said, and he cringed at her hand on his shoulder. “I know it’s hard having us gone so much. It’s normal to want attention, especially at your age. We’re not mad, Steve. We’re just confused.”

Of course it was now that they pulled the ‘busy’ card. They always did that whenever Steve screwed up, took a roundabout way of blaming themselves. _Our little Steve beat up Harold K.? Well, we’re not home as much as we should be._ It was their calling card, their fake admission of guilt. Nothing ever changed. They’d take him out to dinner once, have a blowout fight and leave early. It was the same shit every time. 

“I’m really tired,” Steve said, the only thing he could think to say. “Can I just turn in?” His mom sighed. 

“Steve, this is a big damn deal. Okay?” his father said. “Let us walk you through our day. We get home early, thinking we’re going to surprise our Steve, have a good night together. But we open the door and the house is a goddamn mess. Shit everywhere. But we figure hey, we’re surprising the kid. He’ll be home soon. And we wait and we wait and-”

“-And then you’re doing… _that._ ” 

His mom’s voice was strained, scandalized. Steve’s cheeks burned hot with embarrassment. The reality of the situation was suddenly crashing in. He had kissed Eric, like, more than once. He had enjoyed it. That meant something.

_I’m not gay._

And he wasn’t- he’d always told himself that, and it had always calmed his nerves. But he didn’t believe himself anymore. Guys that weren’t gay didn’t have to tell themselves they weren’t gay. They didn’t even care about it. But Steve always had. Looking back as far as he could remember, ever since he learned what meaning behind the words kids called each other for fumbling the ball, for running slow, for liking music class, he’d always tried to make a point that he wasn’t one of them.

It would have been easy, then, to go through with it. His father’s face was boring into him like a drill. He saw himself turning to the both of them and explaining it all away, giving them Eric’s number, letting them handle it in the ways they ‘handle’ everything- lawyers and restraining orders and official letters of complaint. He know everything that would happen, every beat of his life from that point on. Mom and Dad would let him in on the business trips then, instead of leaving him alone in the house. Steve would come to the board meetings and sit in leather chairs and pitch half-serious ideas. He’d follow his dad to the bar after the meetings, drink enough to get a beer belly, get promoted up the ladder and marry a pretty girl whose father knew Steve’s. He’d have kids with pink cheeks and snotty noses who would be strangers to him, get gray in a house a few towns over and never listen to _Space Oddity_ without getting quiet. And Eric would never call him again, off in San Francisco or Italy, somehow never growing old. 

And so he turned to his parents, not nervous, not sad, just angry. Anger that he suddenly realized had been there for years, and anger that was now big enough to choke on, big enough to smother him if he didn’t spit it out. 

“We were kissing, Mom,” he said. “You can say it.”

It was like time had frozen. He actually thought that maybe it had, that something weird was going on again with Will and the Upside-Down, like the world and everyone in it had started to fade away. His parents were stuck still, their faces glued like plastic in place. But slowly, he watched his mom’s face fall into her hands, and she let out a deep sigh that rattled through the room and echoed like a gunshot. 

“Goddamnit, Steven,” his father started. “For once in your life, this isn’t about you.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, shooting up in his chair. “Then who the hell is it about, Dad?”

“I have a company to run!” he roared. “Have you thought for one second, you ungrateful piece of shit, about what this would do to me?” 

“You?” Steve felt like he’d been hit. “You.” It felt obvious that his father wouldn’t even care. That it wouldn’t be a matter of morality, of love, but a matter of what it would look like for the investors. For the “Them,” the men in suits who he always talked about like they were living in the house and spying on every move the family made. 

His father was talking again, yelling, slamming his hand onto the table, but Steve didn’t know what he was saying. He had kissed a boy a few hours ago, a beautiful boy, and what was he supposed to do if these were his parents? If this was the world? He had half-expected someone to hit him, to beat him until he couldn’t remember how Eric’s lips had tasted. He had half-wanted it. It would have made sense, fit in with the reality he thought he knew. But he didn’t feel like he knew it anymore. 

“I kissed him,” he said, interrupting whatever his father was saying. He was almost pleading for some sort of condemnation that made sense, for a reason why he shouldn’t still be thinking of Eric. Instead, his mom just shook her head, bit her knuckles and looked at him with a mixture of shame and sadness. Like he was too far gone already. Maybe he was. Maybe, the thought occurred to him, maybe they had always known. 

“I liked it,” he tried again. “I kissed him and I liked it. I would do it again if I could.” Nothing. More of his father’s useless worlds, all about stock pricing and brand imaging and the American Christian Middle Class. More of his mom, looking at him like she remembered loving him once.

“Fuck you,” the words came out before he’d finished thinking them.   
Maybe his father yelled, maybe his mom cried. Maybe the floor opened up and swallowed the both of them up forever. He wouldn’t have known. Steve turned his back and grabbed his keys off the wall, pulled his jacket on, and walked out the door. He didn’t look back as he got in the car, but as he drove away, he glanced his father in the rearview mirror, standing alone in the center of the street.

He briefly thought about going to Eric’s, but the thought made him queasy and tired. He wanted to sleep, not to grapple with himself again. Most of all, he wanted to see someone who understood. 

Indianapolis was two hours away, but it felt like more. Steve’s eyes were blurred, exit signs melting into the city lights under them. He tried to remember the numbers, but it was nearly four in the morning and his face was caked in exhaustion. He blasted the radio so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel, which wouldn’t solve anything, he knew. 

_I’m not a prophet or a stone-age man,  
Just a mortal with the potential of a superman. _

Every time one thought finally let him go, another would crash through and catch him off guard. His mom’s face, his father’s hands, Eric’s lips. He kept searching for the feeling that had filled his bones only a few hours earlier. The ecstasy, the flying. It had died, tumbled out the open window somewhere on the highway. 

_I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien  
Can’t take my eyes from the Great Salvation  
Of bullshit faith. _

He remembered Nancy, senior year, blackout at that stupid Halloween party. “You’re bullshit.” At the time, he thought it was the most his world would ever be flipped, shattered. Now it felt like it happened to someone else. He had loved Nancy, he really had. He’d imagined a future with her, a house in the city where he could sit and watch her kick ass every day as some hotshot reporter. He would have been content with that, with being the one making her dinner and listening to her stories about what case she’d solved that day. He was always more like her spectator, just a member of her crowd. He could have looked at her forever, though. The face she made when she was frustrated, the little smile she’d give him when he was pissing her off just the right amount. 

It was hard not to compare to Eric- notice the differences and similarities. How the quiet confidence and pride, the comfort he felt with Nancy was missing with Eric, replaced with uncertainty and the trust in something he couldn’t understand. He had never felt scared during a kiss, he remembered, until Eric leaned over and pressed his lips to Steve’s. God, it felt good. It felt like jumping and holding his breath, without knowing what was waiting for him at the bottom. And then his parents’ words came rushing back all at once, disappointed and selfish and ugly. 

_If I don’t explain what you ought to know  
You can tell me all about it on the next Bardo  
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought  
And I don’t got the power anymore. _

Indianapolis rolled into view, the steady lights of the skyscrapers tracking a golden glow into the car. He took the exit that felt right, prayed loosely to a random God. The exit ramp seemed to never end. He started to realize the extent to which he had No Plan for what to do once he got there, but he knew somewhere in the city was the one person he needed to talk to. The one person who could maybe make it better. 

He wondered what Eric was doing, if he was worried about him or angry with him. Steve wanted to crawl into his lap, he realized with a pang of self-loathing. He wanted to be held. He’d never wanted that before. 

_Don’t believe in yourself  
Don’t deceive with belief  
Knowledge comes with death’s release-_

Steve reached over and turned the radio off, leaving himself with only the sound of his jagged breath and old motor. He didn’t like that song. It was better to sit with silence.

The car was running low on gas, but it was late and he could see the building ahead of him. He followed road signs and exit numbers past the heart of the city, to the parking lot of the tan monolith with skinny windows. He imagined people watching him through them, watching as he slunk out of the car and stumbled towards the campus map on the sidewalk. The sky was dark, and he shivered as a cold breeze cut through his jacket. 

University Tower was down the street, and he saw his breath hanging in front of him as he walked. No one else was out, the streets dead and empty, and he’d never felt more alone. Maybe he should have just taken the cushy job with his dad, forgotten Eric and focused on the pretty blonde in the pretty house. The black hole at the pit of his stomach swirled faster, pulling his breath in. 

Soon the sun would rise, and Steve would have to face what, in a short few hours, he’d turned himself into. He still couldn’t say the words to himself, the most important words that he knew rested at the bottom of the pit, waiting to swallow him up. The ones that made him break into a nervous sweat before showering after basketball, the ones that pulsed behind his eyelids every time he fell asleep, the ones even Nancy couldn’t make go away. The ones that, after Robin confessed, made him breathe relief up to the ceiling. _Oh,_ he wanted to say to her. _Oh. So it’s not just me._

The building rose in front of him, blotting out the little bits of light that fell on the grass below it. There were a few security guards milling around the doors, which were spotlights of bright orange light in the middle of the darkness. One, a taller guy with a mustache, caught Steve’s eye, quickly bringing the walkie-talkie on his waist to his face. Steve knew how he looked, half dead with exhaustion and fumbling madly towards the door to a freshman dorm. There wasn’t any way to run or hide without starting a manhunt he didn’t need right now and honestly, he just wanted a bed to curl himself into. He stood in place and let the guard make his way over to him.

“Hey, son,” the guard said, face lost somewhere in between concern and alarm. “What are you doing here?” Steve bristled, suddenly uncomfortable with being talked to. He shook off the illogical fear that the guard could somehow smell Eric on him. 

“I’m here to visit someone.” The guard raised his eyebrows. “I know, I know what time it is, okay, but I really, really need to see someone right now, it’s an emergency.” 

“It’s four thirty in the morning, kid,” the guard said. 

“I said it was an emergency, didn’t I?” Steve shook in the cold breeze, running a trembling hand through his hair. “Listen, her name is Robin, Robin Buckley. Just ask for her, alright? Can you do that for me?” 

The guard gestured to the other with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to say, _another kid drunk off his ass_. “Can you wait till the morning?”

Steve shook his head, feeling his throat tighten. “Nah, man, I need to see her now.”

“Well I can’t do that for you, son, alright?” He lightly took Steve’s arm, and he knew he was going to try to steer him back to his car. The thought of sitting back in the car seat again, that stupid damn car seat where every damn thing in the last twenty four hours had gone so stupidly wrong, put him over the edge. 

“ _ROBIN!_ ” his voice echoed over the lawn, around the walls. It was ragged, broken, and he felt a stab of satisfaction that it sounded the way he felt. The guard tugged on his arm again, harder this time, less forgiving. Steve yelled again, and again, and again. She was somewhere in there, in the weird labyrinth of concrete and gross architecture, and she held the answers. She could help him figure out where to go, because he knew that she had stood where he was standing before and found a way forward. 

The guard was pulling him away from the building, and there were more of them now, he had called his friends over. The one with the mustache put a hand on Steve’s shoulder, pushed him down, and he was about to buckle and sink to the grass, let them escort him back to his stupid car to wait until morning when he heard his name. 

“ _Steve?!?_ ” she was calling, and his eyes flew up to a window on the fourth floor where a light had just been flipped on. Spilling out around her hair was an amber glow, and he thought without meaning to that she looked like an angel. He understood why he had fallen in love with her a little bit that summer, even if it was based on basically nothing. 

Her head disappeared, but the light stayed on, and he sunk to the ground in relief. She was always doing that, always finding a way to get him to relax. The polar opposite of Eric, who made his muscles way too tense. 

The guards, now confident that he wasn’t trying to break into the dorm buildings to kill people, let their grip on his shoulders relax. A few minutes passed, in silence, with just Steve’s breath to fill the air. The mustache guard spoke over a walkie talkie to someone, but the words washed over Steve’s head and didn’t process. He was so, so tired, and the black hole in his stomach almost sucked all of him in now. 

The _click_ of the doors opening echoed across the campus, and Robin took off, barefoot, towards Steve. She was wearing a giant t-shirt that he didn’t recognize and bulky sweats- he’d clearly woken her up. Her hair was a mess, ratty and tangled, but her eyes were wild. 

“Steve?” she yelled, only a few dozen yards from him now. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

“Rob,” he started, and then crumbled. 

The black hole tumbled itself outward, exploded back into a supernova, and everything that had ever found itself stuck in the depths of the black hole spilled into his mouth, his skin, his blood. He didn’t know what to say to Robin besides everything, because that was what was wrong. Steve didn’t cry unless he let himself, a finely tuned balancing act that he’d known all his life. Robin’s face came into focus, and it looked soft, and it asked “What’s wrong, Steve?” and he felt the tears pool, fall, and then pour. 

And then her arms were around him, and he leaned into the hug, and he realized they had never hugged before. She was shorter than him, enough that it was almost awkward, but he didn’t care. He let her hold him like a mother and rub his back, and whisper “ _Shh. Shh_ ,” into the night air, and he let himself cry and cry and cry, more than he remembered ever having cried before. 

At some point, the guards let Steve go, and went back to milling around the edges of the building, the situation proving too uncomfortable for them to be paid for. And so it was just Steve falling into Robin, the person who would have the answers, his best friend. He was worried he would never stop crying, that he would live the rest of his life in a fugue state, sobbing into the open air. But then something happened that Steve never would have expected - the tears ran out. He had cried it all out, and what was left was achingly hollow, angry, and _tired_.

He pulled away from Robin, whose face was pale. “What happened?” she asked, her voice taut and thin. She chewed on her bottom lip. He didn’t know how to make words happen, but he tried anyway, guards having retreated.

“Eric,” he said, and then realized from the look on Robin’s face he had one hundred percent made it sound like Eric was dead, and he was going to have to provide more information. “He’s - _Eric’sokaydon’tworry_ \- He and I…” 

There was going to be a point where Steve was going to have to say the words. They had spilled out into his blood along with the rest of the Everything, and were circulating through his head, echoing over and over. He looked at Robin, pictured her body folded up against a bathroom stall in the Starcourt Mall, tried to find somewhere in his body a fraction of the strength she’d felt. 

“I like guys,” he said. He said. He said. 

“Holy shit,” Robin whispered, a perfect echo. 

“And I haven’t slept in a day.”

Robin’s dorm was a double, but her roommate was out. It was nice, with hazy orange string lights and a red lava lamp on the desk. There were pictures lining the walls, fuzzy Polaroids of Robin next to people he didn’t recognize. He caught a glimpse of a picture of him, on the hood of his car, drinking a can of Coke, and nearly started crying again. He didn’t know when she’d taken it, but the fact that she’d pinned him up on her wall, that she wasn’t ashamed to have known him, that she maybe pointed to it and told people _that’s Steve, that’s my friend_ … it made him wish again that he could get out of Hawkins, live a real life, be someone. 

Maybe he still could. 

“So are we going to talk about this?” Robin asked, clearing her bed of some of the stuffed animals that were lining it (Steve made a mental note to make fun of her for them once he was conscious). Steve was slumped on the floor, already losing the fight against his body for sleep. His eyes vaguely stung, and he wondered if that was something that always happened after a long cry. 

“‘In th’morning,” he mumbled, inching close to the radiator in search of heat. It was so stupid cold outside. He saw Robin nod in the corner of his eye as she covered her bed with a blanket. 

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, and he believed her. “Okay. Bedtime, Sleeping Beauty.” Steve raised his head, and Robin was pointing at her bed. 

“Wha- no, no, Rob. Thas’yours.” She rolled her eyes, and grabbed Steve’s hand, pulling him up. He had to rest a hand on the headboard to steady himself. 

“I’m sure Julie would much rather have me crash in her bed for a few hours as opposed to a dude she’s never met and who smells like panic and shit.”

“Thanks, asshole,” he muttered, half to himself. It wasn’t worth putting up a fight, and Robin’s crappy, short bed looked like heaven. He let himself fall into it, and the mattress curled around him like Robin had earlier. He still felt cold, but the cold went deeper than his skin. He shook, maybe shivers and maybe convulsions. He wished stupidly that Eric was there - Eric’s eyes, Eric’s hands. Eric’s lips. Steve felt like a middle school girl, and it was humiliating and exhausting. 

His eyes closed, and he could tell in a few minutes he would be out cold. There wasn’t enough energy to care anymore, and he could feel his weight pull down, sinking through the pillow. There was a hand on his back, rubbing his shoulder, and he knew Robin wasn’t going to sleep tonight. Knew enough about the way she protected things to know that she wasn’t leaving him alone. 

“I missed you, Dingus,” she whispered, and Steve fell asleep. 

“No, he drove here.”

Maybe he was dreaming. It would make sense, he’d been dreaming for a long time now. Steve was pretty sure he’d slept at least twelve hours, and the late afternoon light hitting his eyes confirmed it. It all made sense, but he was sure he was dreaming because Eric’s voice was filling the room, tinny and far away. 

“Is he alright?” He sounded concerned, Steve catalogued. Not angry, not like Steve’s dad had tracked him down and beat the shit out of him. Just concerned. 

“He’s still passed out, but he seems okay.”

“Thank God. He’s not hurt?” Eric’s voice was beautiful. He liked being able to think it freely, let it float around in his head and not be scared of it. His voice was beautiful. 

“No, no.” Robin took a breath. “He’s been crying, though.” 

“Shit.” 

“What happened?” Robin asked, hesitant. Steve smiled to himself, thought about how he knew hesitance in Robin’s voice. A year ago, he didn’t know anyone well enough to hear their face.

“I don’t… I don’t wanna say shit I shouldn’t. You know?” Steve couldn’t tell if Eric had already told Robin. Maybe they’d let each other know years back, in middle school, or maybe they’d found each other subconsciously. 

“Yeah. I know.”

“So should I come down?” Steve tensed under the blankets. Come down?

“Eric, you don’t have to-”

“I know I don’t. But I’m gonna.” Eric’s voice was strong, and Steve felt held from eighty miles away. 

“Thank you.”

“I’ll get the seven o’clock bus. Be there by eight thirty. I’ll drive him home.” The idea of ‘home’ sent waves of panic down Steve’s spine. He wondered where his parents were, whether they were thinking about him or already focused on their stupid little lives.

“I’ll be with him until then.” Robin’s voice smoothed his thoughts. 

“Play him some Bowie.”

“I knew you were the sonofabitch who put him onto Bowie.”

“Hey. He brought it on himself.” And it was true. He had. 

“See you at eight thirty, jackass.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Steve had never had friends who said that so casually. The second to last time Steve had loved anything, she had stopped loving him back halfway through. It was still a new thing to hear the word said so easily, so without baggage. 

Robin had hung up the phone, put the receiver back in the phone jack. He was facing the wall, but he somehow knew what she was doing- staring at the back of his head, chewing her lip, and waiting for him to make some sort of movement. So Steve groaned and rolled over, opening his eyes into the afternoon light. Robin was right where he thought she’d be, wearing a bulky multicolored sweater and with her hair pulled into a wild ponytail. 

“Hey Dingus,” she said gently. “How’re we feeling?”

“Great,” he responded, and laughed sharply. He suddenly felt a little embarrassed about the night before, about the _amount_ of crying he’d done in front of her. He wasn’t sure how much was okay to say. A few hours ago felt like years, and sleep had sobered up his vulnerability. But Robin raised her eyebrows at him, and he knew there wasn’t any way he was getting out without talking. “I heard you talking to Eric.”

“Okay.” She was unreadable, and it pissed Steve off. He hated having to bring up the hard questions. 

“He’s not mad?” He tried, but his voice was scared. 

“Should he be?”

“I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. 

“Well, he’s not. Eric is hard to make mad, Steve.”

Steve hadn’t really thought about Robin and Eric being friends, with, like, actual history together. He was trying to picture what their first meeting would look like, when Robin’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Are we gonna talk about it or what?” 

“Yeah, yeah. We are.” He silently thanked her for ripping off the bandage. He could feel the panic start to sink in his chest, and he didn’t want to go back to carrying around that weight. He pushed himself up on his elbows, and let a deep breath out. She stared at him pointedly.

“Okay.”

There was a long, painful silence. Steve felt her eyes on his face, and his cheeks turned pink. 

“You go first,” he said, and his voice was quiet. Robin pushed herself off of Julie’s bed and sat down next to him, and he could tell from her face that she was going to be nice to him even though she was losing her patience quickly. 

“I know Eric is gay, Steve,” she said quietly. “And last night, you told me you were into guys. So. I’ve sort of put the pieces together myself.”

“I’m not gay,” Steve spat out. Robin gave him that look, the same one Eric had. The ‘you’re an idiot’ look. 

“Steven-” she started, but he interrupted. 

“-I know that sounds stupid. Because. Eric… I mean, I’m not an idiot, I know that’s not like heterosexual behavior. But I’m not _gay_ , it just… it doesn’t feel right. Because I loved Nance, and chicks are hot, and… I mean that’s not. That means I can’t be gay.” From the look on Robin’s face, he could tell she believed him, but the ‘you’re an idiot’ face didn’t go away. 

“Maybe you just are into chicks and dudes both.”

“Oh.” Steve froze, and slowly turned his head to Robin. “You- you can? You can do that?”

“Last time I checked, you can do whatever the hell you want,” she said. Steve laughed, louder than he should have, but God, why hadn’t he _thought of that?_ It was so simple, so stupidly simple. Chicks and dudes. How about that. 

“But,” Robin said, a warning creeping into her voice. “I still want to know why you drove yourself here at midnight and slept for twelve hours in my bed and made me have to give Julie a shitton of random excuses as to why she can’t come into her own dorm room.”

“Yeah. Yeah. So I’m into both. I’m into guys and girls.” Saying it out loud felt like an exhale, felt like an explosion of relief. He wondered how long it would feel that way, how much weight there was that lived in him. “And Eric and I… uh. Well, we’ve been hanging out. For awhile.

“And last night, I guess… stuff happened. It was good- good stuff. And I was- um, but then we got back to my place and my folks sorta… surprised us.”

“Oh shit,” she said. Steve kept his head down, riding the wave of words spilling out of his mouth. Once he started, it was hard to quiet it down. 

“Yeah. And Eric bounced, which- not mad at him for that, but. So then they were being jackasses, and I was, like, flipping out, so. So I drove here. Because- because I was scared and I thought maybe you’d… know what to do.”

They sat, still, together, for a minute, and Robin’s head sunk into Steve’s shoulder. With Robin, physical contact was common, inconsequential. Comforting. It was something rare, that Steve didn’t get anywhere else. He leaned into it, and let Robin breathe with him. 

“I’m sorry about your parents,” she whispered. 

“Well, it’s not exactly a shocker.”

“Still.”

“Yeah. Still.” And just like that he was crying again. He wondered if this was how it was going to be now, if it was just going to be this easy to tip him over the edge into tears. Robin reached an arm around him, rubbed his back. They stayed like that for awhile, until Steve’s breath steadied and he could speak again. 

“So Eric’s coming?”

“Eight thirty.”

Steve didn’t have the energy to be nervous about seeing him. He’d heard Eric’s voice on the phone, worried and sad. Right now, he just wanted to be close to him. 

“Hey Rob?” he asked.

“Yeah, Dingus?”

“Is there a place to eat? ‘M starving.”

The cafeteria’s food tasted like shit, but Steve ate more than he had in a very long time. Robin shut him down whenever he mumbled about paying her back for the tab, and she got him five servings of fried rice and taco meat, and two ice cream bars for dessert. 

A few kids sat around the tables, and loud laughter echoed across the high ceiling. It felt different than a high school cafeteria, though. Steve noticed that instead of scared glances around the room, everyone was focused on whoever they were sitting with. There was a sense of ease in the room, like everyone had left perception behind, like no one cared that much about what people thought of them anymore. 

“So he’s not dead,” a clear voice said. “I was getting nervous for a few hours.”

Steve looked up from his second ice cream bar to see a girl with dark brown skin and a light blue buzzcut slide into the seat next to Robin. Cassidy, he figured, unless IUPUI had an abundance of girls with blue hair who were friends with Rob and, by the look on her face, had Rob falling at least mildly in love with them. 

“Cass,” Robin said, and she grinned like an idiot. “How was Intermediate Collage with Clarence?” They both laughed, an inside joke Steve didn’t get. 

“Splendid. Now, how’s Sleeping Beauty?” Cassidy gestured to Steve with her plastic fork, and Steve rolled his eyes. 

“I’m fine.”

“Well, thank the Gods.” 

“Eric is coming to pick him up at eight thirty,” Robin explained. Cassidy’s eyebrows (which were not blue, Steve noted) rose. Robin immediately shoved Cassidy and shook her head. Steve felt his cheeks burn, and went back to his ice cream bar. 

By the time they left the cafeteria, the sun was low in the sky again. It felt like Steve was stuck in perpetual night, like every time he blinker there was another sunset. Robin and Cassidy were going on about whoever Clarence was, and whatever Intermediate Collage meant. It was six-fifteen by Steve’s watch, and he imagined Eric on the bus to Indianapolis, headphones in and listening to _Space Oddity_. 

He didn’t want to think about going home, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to see his parents, or maybe he didn’t want his parents to see him. It was one or the other, but it was enough to make him nauseous. 

Back in Robin’s dorm room, Steve sat on the floor against the radiator and gazed at the ceiling. There was an off-white yellow stain that, if he squinted at it right, looked like the cover of _The Man Who Sold the World_. Robin and Cassidy kept talking, and eventually their voices faded away into the background of Steve’s head.   
Six-thirty. Seven. Seven thirty. Eight. Only half an hour left, and Steve hadn’t moved from his spot on the floor. Eventually, Cassidy left, pecking Robin on the cheek, and it was just the two of them again. 

“I really have missed you, Dingus,” she said, lying on her bed. “You should pop up to visit sometime.”

“I probably will. I’ll have a ton of free time.”

“Like more than usual?”

“Well, I was supposed to have a shift today, and since you’ve been gone that sonofabitch Keith has been just itching for a reason to fire me. So I’m guessing I’m gone.”

Robin laughed, turning over and leaning on her elbows. “Keith does really hate you.”

Steve leaned his head back onto the radiator top, feeling the heat seep into his scalp. “He does. But I’ll be able to hop down at least once a month. And I guarantee you, Rob, that if you were still in Hawkins, I wouldn’t be in the shit I’m in.” She grinned, closed her eyes. 

“I think you having the hots for Eric has little to do with my absence.”

“No, no, not that. I just… I bet you a million bucks I would’ve realized some shit about myself earlier if I was talking to you more often.”

“Like the liking guys shit?” she asked.

“Yeah. Like the liking guys shit.” 

“How long have you known?” She asked, an echo of him a few months earlier. The corner of Steve’s mouth curled upwards. 

“I’d say since yesterday when I kissed a dude and liked it.” 

They both burst out laughing. It reminded Steve of the time in the movie theater bathroom, after the nausea and the vomiting and the Russian Spies. 

“You’re such an idiot, Dingus,” she mumbled after the laughter died down, face pressed in her pillow. 

“I know, Rob. I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow this took a long time to write! Thanks for all that've been reading :) Things will work themselves out, I promise!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for reading Chapter One! I'll try to post at least 2 times a week. This is my first time on here since the 8th grade, and quarantine has filled me with enough hubris to start writing again. I also have a healthy obsession with Steve Harrington and a desperate thirst for bi rep in media that I know will never come to fruition.


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